Adrian Kavanagh, 15th October 2025
Here are the ten constituencies that were the most successful constituencies (as ranked by vote share) for female candidates at the 2024 General Election. Women won more votes than men in just five of the forty three constituencies being contested at this election. Nationally, female candidates won 31.7% of the overall first preference votes cast at this election. It’s obviously far from a 50-50 split in terms of a gender voting breakdown, but it is a vast improvement on how things stood at the 2011 General Election, where women accounted for only 15.2% of the candidates. The level of change over the past decade and a half has been driven by the introduction of a gender quota, in the wake of that 2011 election contest, with political parties standing to lose half of their state funding if they fail to achieve the gender quota target (and political parties in the Republic of Ireland are very much reliant on this state funding(. The quota was initially set at 30% (as used at the 2016 and 2020 elections), but the legislation made provisions for this to increase to 40% within seven years of the first general election at which the quota was used (i.e., from 2023 onwards) and the 40% gender quota target was in place for the first time at the 2024 General Election.
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Irish Elections: Geography, Facts and Analyses 